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ReiserFS creator charged with murder

Open source software developer Hans Reiser was arrested by Oakland police and …

Open source software developer Hans Reiser, the creator of the widely used ReiserFS filesystem, was arrested yesterday and charged with murder. Police say he is the prime suspect in the disappearance and alleged murder of his wife, Nina Reiser. The separated couple had struggled with bitter marital disputes since 2004 and were involved in a pending divorce at the time of his wife's disappearance last month. Although a body has not yet been located, Oakland police say they have gathered enough circumstantial evidence to justify an arrest. The arrest follows a second search of the software developer's home conducted by the police in cooperation with the FBI. In addition to performing searches, law enforcement agents also conducted 24-hour surveillance and collected a DNA sample of the software developer. After extensive investigation and numerous interviews, Oakland Police Department's homicide commander Lt. Ersie Joyner told the Bay City Newswire, "We interviewed a host of individuals. All avenues led back to Mr. Reiser being responsible for the death and disappearance of Ms. Nina Reiser."

Late last month during the initial investigation, Reiser refused to cooperate with the police, anticipating that they would eventually make him a suspect. Reiser's attorney William DuBois characterized his client as "absolutely distrustful" of the law enforcement agents, and pointed out that the police had done "everything in their power to treat him like a suspect, including seizing his house for three days and going over every inch of the premises and testifying against him in his attempt to get custody of his children." After the disappearance of his wife, Reiser had attempted to gain custody of his children who had lived with his wife during their separation. In a temporary ruling issued last month, a Judge ordered that the children should remain in foster care.

According to the San Francisco Chronicle, Hans Reiser was accused of abusive behavior by his wife, who was granted a restraining order against him in December 2004. Reiser was expected to defend himself in court later this month against accusations that he had neglected to provide child-care payments, a claim that he refutes.

Reiser is a relatively well-known figure amongst Linux enthusiasts. ReiserFS was the first filesystem included in the standard Linux kernel to support journaling, and it is presently the default filesystem in a number of prominent Linux distributions, including SUSE and Slackware. Although ReiserFS provides superior performance in a very specific set of contexts (dealing with a large volume of files that are smaller than four kilobytes) it is losing mindshare as a consequence of several factors. Late last month, SUSE Labs employee Jeff Mahoney advocated replacing ReiserFS with ext3 as the default filesystem for the SUSE Linux distribution. Citing considerable scalability issues, poor support for extended attributes, and the small size of the ReiserFS developer community, Mahoney feels that ReiserFS is no longer appropriate for SUSE Linux.

Hans Reiser's company, Namesys, has actively been developing Reiser4, a new version of the filesystem which has received funding from DARPA and Linspire. Reiser4 has not yet been included in the Linux kernel because of technical concerns and political issues. The Reiser4 project has only a handful of developers, and will suffer a potentially insurmountable setback if Hans Reiser is no longer able to participate.

At this point, the nature of the evidence still hasn't been revealed, a body hasn't been located, and the basis for the charge has yet to be publicly disclosed. The validity of the police's allegations will be easier to judge when more information is made available. Those with information about the disappearance of Nina Reiser are invited to report it to the authorities by visiting the Help Find Nina Reiser web site.